Nancy Santullo

Nancy Santullo was having a typical day in her life as a high-profile fashion photographer, shooting a spread on Cameron Diaz for a glossy magazine. One of her favorite male models was standing in front of her – in nothing but his Calvin Kleins.

Then, in the next instant, her whole life changed.

"It was as if I just woke up from a dream. I said to myself, 'I can't do this anymore. There has got to be more than this,'" says Santullo.

At that point, in the mid-'90s, she had been immersed for almost two decades in the glamorous world of fashion and celebrity, starting as an art school grad when she'd brazenly knocked on Richard Avedon's door to ask for an internship.

But when her father died in 1991, she began to ask herself "the profound questions of 'Who am I? Why am I here? And who am I doing this all for?'" Those all reached their pressure point in that moment at the photo shoot.

"That world of exterior beauty, that's what I was programmed for. But my soul was longing to connect with interior beauty, and that was the journey I began to go on."

She started studying Eastern schools of thought, like yoga, Buddhism and traditional medicine practices. When a Taoist teacher told her she needed to "go south" to find her calling, she thought at first he meant Georgia. "I thought, yeah, I can do that. I was still glamorous – I was thinking a 'Gone With the Wind' type of house!" Santullo laughs now at the memory.

She couldn't ever have imagined then that the journey would ultimately lead her to the Amazon jungle in Peru and turn her into a fierce advocate for the indigenous people there. Even more incredibly, that she would start House of the Children, a nonprofit organization that would be the first – and so far only – to successfully bring clean water and sanitation to those people.

Begun by Santullo in 2003, House of the Children started a "Rainforest Flow" project that uses low-tech, sustainable sand filter tanks to build stone drinking fountains and bathrooms in the villages of Huacaria, Tayakome and Yomybato in the Manu National Forest. The efforts have cut waterborne diseases in children by almost half, and have been hailed by the United Nations Global Teaching and Learning Project.

When in 2000 she finally figured out that "south" was a little father than Georgia, she didn't go with a project or even Peru specifically in mind, but on what she thought would be a sabbatical throughout Latin America to connect with shamans and traditional medicine men to learn what she could about the healing traditions of indigenous people who were still connected to nature. Before she embarked on the trip, she said a little prayer, "If this is my direction, bring the people to me that will help me along the way."

Be careful what you wish for: She walked into a tourist agency in Cusco, Peru, and told the woman behind the counter that "I want to go to the jungle, but not on a tour."

The woman told her to come back the next day, and that the trip was free. What the woman didn't say was that it was a trip on a flatbed truck with chickens and animals, through a cloud forest where she would sleep in a hut with an open door, listening to the growls of jaguars in the night. And this with Santullo knowing only one word of Spanish.

"I could say, 'Si!' Or '¿Si?' I'm sure it was maddening for them. The nerve of me doing that!"

And yet, trekking through the jungle in her Ralph Lauren designer boots, she managed to locate a local shaman. "It was such a profound experience," she recalls. "Then, the kids in the village were back from the river. They do that several times a day to bathe because of the heat. The little girls picked these red flowers and started putting them all around my heart, and they grabbed my hands, and we were just walking through the forest together. I don't know if I found them or if they found me."

She also noticed the children had bloated faces and distended bellies. She didn't have a medical degree, but she did have the trained eye of a photographer, skilled in noticing what others miss. She realized these cultures had all the things needed to survive except the most elemental thing – clean water.

She never did make it on that trip through South America. She returned to Newport Beach, sold her house, gave away a showroom full of furniture, and essentially quit a career where she made $10,000 a day. Then, with no experience in grant writing or anything else, began House of the Children, in a country where she didn't speak the language.

Her friends thought she was, well, off her rocker. "When she told me she sold everything she owned and was going to Peru, I said, for what?" says friend Debra Downing of Newport Beach, who became House of the Children's founding board member.

"She said this is a calling. Then, when I saw the first village, what she had done, it was overwhelming. When the villagers saw her truck, they started running out of the house, calling 'Gringa!' She is literally one person changing the world."

Experts in the Amazon told her not even to try, because so many had come in promising the natives changes and not followed through. And yet, Santullo succeeded where governments and international aid organizations have failed.

"It was divinely aligned," she says. The woman at the travel agency in Peru? She turned out to be a biologist who knew anthropologists, engineers and other experts who helped Santullo navigate technology and the culture. And that training in New York and Hollywood? It turned out to have given her invaluable lessons in being intrepid and relentless in pursuit of a goal.

"Poverty only exists in the mind, and when we can see beyond what our eyes see and our ears hear, we are not poor at all. Our soul is greater than any obstacle," says Santullo. "I wanted to build a project from a place of strength and not from weakness."

Years after that first trek through the jungle, Santullo would find herself sitting next to the head of the State Department at a global partnering event at the United Nations.

"I leaned over to him and said, 'What would happen if you stopped using the word 'poor' in our development here? If global agencies stopped projecting that word 'poor' onto the people that we come in contact with?' He said, 'I never thought of that.' We are one global family. We are there to help each other along the way. I've learned deep states of compassion and an ability to walk beyond any fears of what I thought was possible. We can make what feels impossible possible."

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